In today's society, many communication avenues exist by which people can easily publish information that is readily accessible to other users. For example, the Internet provides people with access to various online communities, news-aggregation sources, social media websites, and/or other open-communication sources. While these communication avenues are valuable in that they encourage free thought and the dissemination of ideas, the ease by which information can be irrevocably published via these communication avenues for anyone to access can allow malicious users to publish sensitive or confidential information that can negatively affect other users or organizations.
Often, organizations hire employees who are provided with access to sensitive information, such as the development of a new product for the organization that has not come to market. To mitigate this, employers often have their employees enter into agreements where the employee agrees not to disclose confidential information outside the organization. However, disgruntled employees with access to confidential information still pose an insider threat to the organization, such as by potentially leaking information about development of the new product prior to being released to the public. Rather than being reactive to information leaks by quickly removing leaked information from an online location, employers desire to identify employees who pose insider threats before a malicious act is taken by the employees. However, it is difficult to determine if an employee is unhappy while still maintaining the privacy for the employee. Additionally, when an organization employs a large workforce, it is impracticable to have access to the amount of resources needed to determine if one of their employees pose an insider threat. Further, employers often experience biases towards certain employees, such as having more favorable opinions of high-performing employees, and less favorable opinions of low-performing employees. However, these biases commonly experienced by employers may prevent those employers from identifying employees that may pose a threat, such as by assuming a high-performing employee is not a threat to leave the organization or be disgruntled at the organization. Accordingly, employers are unable to identify employees who pose an insider threat, or another type of threat, to an organization.